The Case of Troy Davis

[kandrathe]

I maybe am misunderstanding your point. Are you saying you think people who say no death penalty no matter what should be on a jury deciding a death penalty case? That doesn´t seem very reasonable - of course the accused will not get the death penalty which requires a unanimous vote in most (all?) states. Like Pete said the possibility of the death penalty is not up to the jury to decide - it´s up to the legislative branch. "Jury of your peers" is not possible in this case. So what do you propose? What about life imprisonment - some people object to that as well? Ultimately you need a jury to decide what follows the laws that are in existence at the time. If someone says they can´t do that, then no, they should not be on a jury. This probably is a straw-man argument and you mean something more nuanced; I´m just missing what.

No. I'm just speaking about a statistical sample of jurors. Say they represent a continuum from harsh to lenient. If all death penalty opponents are also lenient jurors, then if you remove them, the juror pool has been skewed toward harsh.

So, it would need to be statistically shown that a large portion of anti-death penalty people were also lenient as jurors. Intuitively, it makes sense.

Here is one article. Summarizing the salient points;

Reid Haste of the University of Colorado has published an excellent book on jury research, entitled Inside the Juror: The Psychology of Juror Decision-Making (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Extensive studies by a wide range of social scientists and psychologists, and Haste's own research, support the following statistically significant conclusions about death-qualified jurors.

1) Witness Credibility -- Death-qualified jurors rate police, prosecutors, and prosecution witnesses as significantly more credible than do jurors who oppose the death penalty.
2) Inferences & Assumptions -- Statistics have found that jurors who support the death penalty are more likely to accept the prosecution's version of events rather than the defense version when ambiguities exist or when there is incomplete evidence.
3) Standard-Of-Proof Threshold -- It has been found that the jurors' application of the judges' instructions on the "reasonable doubt” standard of proof is influenced by the jurors' attitudes toward the death penalty.
4) Willingness To Convict -- Every juror study has found that jurors who did not oppose the death penalty were more likely to convict than were jurors who did oppose the death penalty.
5) Regret For Wrongful Conviction -- Death-qualified jurors show significantly less sympathy to the defendant then do those who oppose the death penalty.

As for a single anti-death penalty hold out on the jury. I would give sentencing back to the judges. Use juries to determine guilt or innocence, but not to determine the punishment. If the prosecution is seeking the death penalty, then I believe there needs to be incontrovertible evidence of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". The jury shouldn't have the bear the responsibility of making life and death decisions. I would also remove all the "mandatory minimum sentencing" restraints on judges. Give back the judicial power to the judiciary. Here is an article from 10 years ago that discusses another major issue of injustice in the court system, that of inadequate representation.

Things such as the following excerpt are chilling, considering that we are giving the State to power to kill its citizens;

In Houston, Texas, the death penalty capital of the country, attorney Ron Mock has represented about 10% of the people the county has sent to death row, probably more than any other defense attorney in Texas. Mock starts each day not as a member of the bar, but at the bar he owns in downtown Houston, Buster's Drinkery. [27] Of his 15 capital clients, 12 ended up on death row, including Gary Graham, a 17-year-old who was convicted largely on the basis of a single eyewitness and no physical evidence. Mock's investigator, Merv West, said Mock discouraged him from working hard on the case: "I remember that from the first Ron Mock insinuated that Gary was guilty, and that definitely affected my investigation. Since we both assumed Gary was guilty, I decided not to waste time trying to substantiate his alibi. . . ." [28] By taking a large number of cases, Mock has consistently been a leader in receiving the most money among court-appointed attorneys in Houston.

We assume that death penalty cases are thorough, but I believe quite the opposite is true. If my State had the DP, due to this kind of sloppiness, I would be against it until it could be fairly administered and only for those cases that are particularly heinous and the proof is overwhelming.

Then again, as I read through some of the cases I'm reminded of that Clint Eastwood western, "The Unforgiven" -- "We've all got it coming." Meaning, that while some of the people were wrongly convicted, that doesn't necessarily mean that some didn't deserve the sentence for some other crimes they committed and weren't prosecuted. Some are entirely innocent however.